This week in Camrose, a production of Kat Sandler’s dark comedy Bright Lights is being performed by a University of Alberta Augustana theatre class. There is one more performance, tomorrow (Sunday November 24th) at 2 pm.

I had seen a Blarney Productions run of this play at the Edmonton Fringe 2024, directed by Luc Tellier and featuring familiar local actors Rachel Bowron, Oscar Derkx, Braden Dowler-Coltman, Mhairi Berg, and Jenny McKillop. I’d enjoyed it a lot.

The Augustana performances take place in the Augustana Theatre Centre, a former chapel now repurposed with a small proscenium stage and steeply-raked audience seating. The pre-set creates a setting in a cluttered multi-purpose/meeting room in a church, with table and chairs surrounded by the necessities of exercise groups, Sunday school classes, sign-up sheets, water jugs, and assorted overflow storage.

The first two characters to enter, Zoe (AC Capper) and Laurel (Halen Vaage), are arriving at some kind of support group – Zoe as a hesitant first-timer and Laurel as a jealous and protective insider. This gets weirder when we learn that it’s a group for people who have encountered aliens, and escalates as Zoe meets the other group members, Dave (Jack Purnell), aggressive and challenging, Wayne (Michael McCarroll) the former actor who keeps trying to apply lines from the TV series he was in, and Ross (Hung Nguyen) the smooth-talking group leader. They start out by reciting their routine group convictions – “This is a safe place.” “We believe you” – but then they immediately challenge Zoe to tell her own alien-encounter story and prove that she isn’t, as they say, a “lookie-lou”. While her story has elements familiar to them – the bright lights, the compulsion to follow, the loss of time – it also raises some questions which challenge the premise of the group. People turn on each other. Weapons come out. Truths come out … or do they? Even having seen the play several months ago, I didn’t remember all the plot twists, and I was on the edge of my seat at a few points, with one piece of theatre-magic making me shout with surprise. The pacing was very good. I could see that each character always had motivation for their behaviour. There were a couple of high-energy exchanges where I had a bit of trouble understanding characters who were shouting, but that didn’t hurt my ability to follow the story. Bright Lights was directed by course instructors Jake Tkaczyk and Kevin Sutley. Tickets are available here for tomorrow afternoon’s closing performance or at the door, $20 general admission or $5 for Augustana students.